It was a small room, tidy, with a single twin bed made up with a gray blanket. An ornate desk sat against the other wall, the kind of desk a young girl might use. Next to it were bookshelves, empty. There was a rug in the middle of the floor. A wooden clock ticked on the wall.
Beth Greer had been born in 1954. Which meant this room, her little-girl room, had sat here unchanged for some sixty years.
Some families didn’t change their children’s rooms. They kept their kids’ beds, their bookshelves, long after the child in question had grown up and moved out. My own mother had kept my and Esther’s room intact until my parents moved to Florida. But that was a pattern born of love, of nostalgia, and the thought that maybe grandchildren would want to use the room someday.
That wasn’t what this was. This little girl’s room had never been changed because the space wasn’t needed in a house with so many rooms and only three people. It was unchanged because Mariana Greer couldn’t be bothered. And then it stayed unchanged because both Julian and Mariana were dead, and Beth had let it sit for another forty years.
What the hell was wrong with this place?
I moved past the bedroom and farther down the hall. The air was still, even stuffier than it was downstairs. Like fresh air was alien to this place. The next door I tried opened to a bathroom, but the one after that was a room with a heavy wood desk with a blotter on it and a leather chair. Julian Greer’s study.
I stepped inside. I felt like an intruder in this room, as if the man who owned it would walk back in at any minute. He’s been dead for over forty years, I reminded myself as I approached the desk and put my hand on one of the drawer handles. After a brief pause to inhale a breath, I yanked the drawer open.
Inside was a pack of cigarettes. Winstons, in the distinctive red and white package. Next to it was a heavy metal lighter. There was an empty ashtray on the desk.
I pushed aside the cigarettes, left here by a man dead for decades, and picked up a piece of paper from the stack beneath it. It was a phone bill dated January 3, 1972, listing the calls in and out of the house.
My God. Had Beth thrown nothing away in all these years? This was some kind of mental illness, maybe even a psychosis. How was it possible that she looked so modern and fashionable when she lived in this museum? How could she be mentally stable when for forty years her life had been lived in a shrine to her parents?
Beneath the phone bill was another, and another. On the third bill, I thought I saw the ghost of dark handwriting on the back of the paper. I turned it over and saw three words scrawled in ink:
I’m still here
The breath left my throat. Those were the words I’d heard whispered into my phone. I turned over the other two phone bills and saw the same three words written on the back. Suddenly, I’d hazard a guess that I’d see those words written on every piece of paper in this desk.
I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket with numb fingers and snapped photos of the scrawled words. Thinking of the way the last interview had vanished from my phone, I immediately texted the pictures to Michael. I didn’t even bother with a message. He knew I was at the Greer mansion right now.
I hit send, and then I noticed that the air was cold. And there was the soft sound of someone breathing right outside the open door of the study.
“Beth?” I called out.
The air grew colder, and there was a soft shh. I looked down and saw that all of the desk drawers were open.
I took a clumsy step back, then rounded the desk to bolt for the door. It slammed closed, and I saw the shadow of something moving in the crack beneath the bottom of the door and the floor. Not feet—something sliding smoothly across the door, from one side to the other and back.
I lifted my hand to the doorknob, and something pounded on the other side of the door. Bang. Bang. I stumbled back in shock, and my phone fell from my hand, spinning across the floor and under the desk. I dropped to my knees as the banging continued, heavy and rhythmic, almost a human sound but not quite. Flinching with each bang, I groped under the desk until my fingers found my phone. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the smooth shadow still moving back and forth. It definitely wasn’t human feet.
I pulled my phone toward me. There was a crack across the screen. The banging stopped, and the room rang with silence. I rose to my knees and glanced beneath the door again. The shadow was gone.
In my hand, my phone lit up, and a voice came from the recorder. A harsh whisper, like I’d heard before.
“I’m still here,” the voice said.
That was when I got to my feet and ran.
* * *
—
Beth wasn’t downstairs. She wasn’t in the living room. Her empty glass with its melting ice was sitting on the table.
“Beth!” I shouted.
Upstairs, I heard footsteps in the hallway, heading for the stairs.
I grabbed my bag from the sofa and put it under my arm. The curtains in the living room were drawn, but I could see a shadow of something beyond them, out there on the grass.
In my hand, my phone lit up again. The recorder played, and this time it sounded like an old recording, or maybe an old answering machine.
“What do you think?” a woman said through my cracked screen. “Is she bitter, or is she sweet? I could never decide. Sometimes she was so sweet, but other times . . . Well, I don’t like to think about it.”
I wanted to run, but something drew me to the window instead. I stepped forward and yanked the curtain open.
There was the dead expanse of lawn outside, the empty ocean. A girl stood at the edge of the drop, her back to me. She was blond, slender, and young—a teenager, wearing jeans and a flowered blouse. Her feet were bare. Her hair lifted in the wind. She stood for a moment, and then she tipped forward and vanished over the edge in a whisper of fabric.
I shouted and pounded the glass.
“She can get so angry,” the voice on my dead phone said. “She loses control. But I think you should look behind you. She’s coming down the stairs.”
There were footsteps behind me. I turned from the window and bolted from the house, down the front steps to the driveway. The cool, damp air hit my face like a slap. I was almost at the sidewalk when I sank to the ground, frozen in panic, my breath heaving and my stomach turning. I stared at the grass as the moisture soaked through the knees of my jeans and a bird called overhead. In the distance, a car went by. The world going about its business.
Footsteps came toward me on the sidewalk. It was Beth. She had put on ballet flats and a trench coat—not the old coat from the seventies, but a newer one, dark blue, expensive Burberry. It was belted at the waist, and the hem fell past her knees. In the cloudy light, she looked like the woman in the YouTube videos and the photographs, and also like the woman I knew. Her eyes were unreadable.
When she came to my side, she lowered herself down to a crouch. She touched my cheek with her fingertip, dragging it lightly across my skin, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
“For someone so paranoid, you should choose your friends more carefully,” she said.
I was starting to breathe again. The fear was still there, but my stomach had slowed its nauseated turning. “Who is she?” I asked Beth.
“You’re so close,” Beth said. “You have so many questions, so many things you want to know. You’ve come closer than anyone else ever has. You’ve almost finished the game, Shea. You’ve almost won. Just use your brain and figure out the last part.”
Then she stood and walked to the Greer mansion. When she got to the steps, the front door swung open.
Then Beth went inside, and the door closed behind her with a click. And she was gone.
PART II
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
December 1977
BETH